Color Wheel
by Luc Court
Summary: Multichapter fic, Kabuto character study. Spoilers. The colors of various masks and the way they contribute to the single individual who wears them. Finished.
1. white

Color Wheel  
_Naruto, Kabuto-centric. Multi-chapter fic for a certain nin's birthday. Hope you like it._

.white

He starts with nothing.

That's what he'd been advised, lectured by the hands that bundled him into Mist-child rags and dropped him stumbling onto the battlefield. _Be nothing,_ he was ordered. _Be empty._

Threats in the form of youth are in abundance throughout the Countries. Konoha wouldn't be the first village to be surprised by an explosive packed in the form of a babe, a fully-trained assassin tucked up in swaddling linens. A boy who dressed in full-equipment wouldn't look like an innocent to the Leaf Villagers come pelting through the storm. No. He would be perceived as a danger. Alive and on the battleground of snowy hills--he would be recognized as a mystery, and mysteries kill.

So it is castaway clothes Kabuto bears and little more, hand-me-downs from strangers he's never met. Those hands that abandoned him to chance also left no weapons on the field, no way to defend himself even by honest mistake.

No protection, no defense. Kabuto shivers in the snow, an open-wound vulnerability begging at the charity of Konoha's forces. Hoping to be found. Surrounded by ice crawling into his too-loose shirt collar and seeping into his overlarge sandals, slogging towards the dim sounds of death as his only compass.

He paws pale hair out of his face. Picks illusionary forms from out the blizzard, and traces the noise of screams.

A clean, blank slate, he was told. _Be completely white._

That isn't hard for him to do while lost in the snow. He lets it fill him up as he walks, in his clothes and in his mind, until at last when the winds break open to reveal the bodies of the fallen, Kabuto doesn't even flinch.

The next time he experiences white as more than commonplace object is two months later, in his father's study.

The colors of the Yakushi residence are painted with an eye out for soothing tones, choices made with the same clinical relaxation in mind as the furnishings of waiting rooms. Medics bring their work home with them as easily as any other profession. Kabuto's mother had requested specific forms of beige, tan and ivory to spruce up the house with, so neutral that the Yakushis could have seen patients in their kitchen with the same professional aplomb.

White is nothing special in the Yakushi house. White allows for bleached clothing and sterilization. Kabuto has become accustomed to white as a comfortable standard by the time he wanders into his father's study one afternoon, and sees a rainbow split wide open in dissection on the wall.

He stands in the doorway, fixed by his discovery. At eight he is still uncertain enough in the Village that he'd picked up the bad habit of shoving his fist to his mouth whenever he is nervous, and the gesture happens again now, fingers jamming themselves against his lips.

Page whisper. Kabuto's father is seated at the desk, going over one of his diagnostic manuals. Sunlight is pouring through one of the windows and pooling over the papers and books, over the bones of the instructional skeletons standing in the corner and finally meeting up with the prism.

"Ah, Kabuto." His father's voice is salted caramel in a room of afternoon honey. He flips another page, marks it with a penciled loop. "Did you need something?"

Kabuto's reply is a whisper hushed, so as not to break the sunbeams. "Dad."

The word is strange for him to use when he is thinking of any other color than white. For all her medical skills, his adopted mother hasn't been able to conceive. Whether that spurred her husband to take in the foundling from the field or not, Kabuto has no evidence for or against.

If they see the blank slate in him that they could shape into their child in truth, Kabuto doesn't know. If it blinds them to all other suspicions of his origins, then their soft hearts fall in his favor, and he can't complain. Their compassion gives him luxury to move. It allows him to be a newcomer in a Village which has outlasted its enemies and made a number of them along the way.

Kabuto is a cuckoo child. His feathers have not yet grown in past their pale downiness. There are no other nestlings for him to kick out in the meantime, thankfully, so they remain pristine.

He thinks of white when he is nervous as a child. It makes some things easier to say.

His father looks up once more from his book when he realizes that the boy has not moved; following Kabuto's fixed gaze, the man breaks into a chuckle. "So you like the paperweight, do you? I keep it because it's just like anatomy." The doctor hefts the manual aside, setting down his pencil to tap the glass pyramid with a finger. "People are made up of hundreds of working parts inside that combine to give you the picture on the surface. You look at a sunbeam and see only the basic light, but when you split it apart, you see that it's much more complex than that."

Kabuto's father continues to speak, unaware of how the child is edging in from the doorway and sideways against the wall with the same wariness as if he expected the colors themselves to leap out of the rainbow, and devour him.

"Part of our work as doctors is to figure out what might be inside," the man jabs a finger at the prism, "by studying the outside first and then progressing deeper."

"So white is a lie," Kabuto observes, around the knuckle of his thumb.

By now he has crept halfway towards his father's desk, methodically following the corners of the room by sidesteps, back against the wall. He bumps the books with his spine as he leans into their support. The texts are deep browns and reds and greys, but Kabuto knows the pages inside are all pale underneath the print.

"Yes and no." His father's sigh shows that he has not yet thought of this particular descriptive for the prism, but now that he has been presented with the symptoms, he will address them each in order. "White is made up of all these colors, but it's also itself at the same time. Only when it's a beam of light does it have these things, you know. If you try to take the colors in nature and make white out of them, all you get is black. I think you've discovered that already with your painting set, much to your mother's chagrin," the man smiles, paternal conspiracy for his adopted son.

Kabuto takes his hand away from his mouth, wipes it on the corner of his shirt. "Yes."

His father is already moving on in his lecture, propelled by his own instructional practice. "Just like you're more than your arm or your nose, so too is a person like a ray of light. But you can shine all the colors of light on a unified spot to make white again. You can't do that with a body. Since we haven't learned how to bring a person back to life from just mixing together their organs," he continues, turning the heavy weight of the prism in his hands, spiraling the rainbow across the wall, "we have to handle them as if they're paint. Do you understand, Kabuto?"

"I think so." The study air is musty, warm, and Kabuto doesn't need to feign the yawn. His mother had sent him to fetch his father for an early dinner, but the afternoon is just reaching its zenith, and eating doesn't seem half as attractive as sitting in a room of books and skeletons. Nor as horrifyingly interesting as staring at the colors exposed on the walls.

"White isn't a lie," his father concludes, turning back to his books. "It's just... easily overlooked sometimes. Like you, Kabuto," he adds, reaching over to ruffle the hair of the boy, tousling the cuckoo fluff. "The kids in your class aren't bothering you still, are they?"

"No," Kabuto says.

Which is true enough, once the words are passed through a filter, gutted to shine like rainbows.


	2. blue

.blue

In celebration of his fifteenth birthday, Kabuto goes to the springtime festival with his teammates.

Neither of his parents had known what to do about the subject of birth dates, and honoring a finding-day when so much of a battle had marked the occasion was morbid to their sensibilities. They had asked him in the beginning, when he was young, what he remembered of his life before Bellflower Pass. Kabuto had denied a great deal of it with shakes of his head. His original family, his home, the clothes on his back that he was found with; everything including his own birth was an unknown factor. Safer that way for the cuckoo child.

Recall was buried beneath memory of snow. When they tried to gently prod for more details, Kabuto claimed only he remembered white.

Eventually his father--one finger on the diagnostic manual, the other carefully sighting into Kabuto's eyes with a flashlight--determined that the battle had been too traumatic for a boy of eight. His mother had agreed. Even that excuse might not have been plausible to a village of Konoha's caliber, save that the Yakushis had pled patience on their child's behalf along with the claim that such memory loss proved the boy was better suited to medical practice than assassinations.

Killing, they said, was clearly not in his nature.

Kabuto's birthdays were henceforth celebrated simultaneously with the first village-wide celebration that was held after the anniversary of Bellflower passed. Kabuto had attended a winter-biddance festival once where ice was ceremonially broken over nearby streams and rivers, all to herald in the changing of the seasons. Another time, it had been a yam cooking event.

This year the weather has been unexpectedly fair, and with no real ice to shoo off, the Yakushis have defaulted to spring. Too early for the cherry blossoms, but fresh growth was starting on the fields. More than enough reason to celebrate when the village had gone restless throughout the winter.

As a second form of oddity, Kabuto's teammates have volunteered to show up early to spend the night at his house beforehand. They promised to be back from the celebrations at a reasonable hour, nodded impatiently when the Yakushis reminded them to dress warmly to avoid a chill. The weekend has not even started when the team assembles in Kabuto's room, cross-legged on the floor and doublechecking their equipment.

His parents think the reason for the meeting is because his teammates are trying to cheer him up for yet more bad grades. Neither one of them display particular genius of their own, but Kabuto has always been the laggard out of all of them. He's better suited for taking over the family practice than out on missions. With work, Kabuto might yet become a fine field medic, but no one's making any bets.

In reality there are geniuses in full in Konoha. They have been the strongest Village for many years even despite the Nine-tails attack. The latest Chuunin prodigy is only thirteen, already in line for position as an Anbu captain, leading experienced assassins over twice his age. And then there was the Copy Ninja, graduated the Exams at six; no one has been able to top Hatake's scores yet, but they are trying.

At fifteen, Kabuto is already past the age where instructors are expecting flights of high achievement. He is a write-off. The test papers come back on sheets lined with blue, saying C-average, B-normal. Blue wrappings for his scrolls, and blue grades.

If he scores A's, people might start remembering that he is adopted, and then also remember that children from the Mist regions are prone to premature homicide.

Then they might start to wonder what a child had been doing on the battlefield at all, if not to fight because he was skilled enough to kill.

These are important observations for Kabuto to avoid. As a spy, he should be able to make his face perfect. He should have learned how to school it to whatever expression he pleases. He should be a mirage of shadow dancing in the air. Changing at a whim. Where vague truths overlap, shades are created. Kabuto cannot be lax with what colors go where.

This is because Kabuto has an endless need for masks, and it is important to keep them all organized. He has so many that he made room on the spectrum just to contain them all, divided into neat subsections of pigment. He asked the rainbow to bend its arch into a wheel, flexed from end to end, so that while he's busy moving from one facade he's already entering another.

When Kabuto is debating which side of the spectrum to use, he spins the color wheel in his mind. The distorted rainbow is twisted upon itself like a moebius strip, flashing shades as it ripples by. It hides inside his teeth while he orders ramen for lunch. It fills his smile with white, green, and yellow.

But when he is with his two teammates, then he is blue. He is his shirt because that is what they see when they look at him, expecting a teenager who is dressing in the fashion of the other two with an additional flair. He is his scorecard. Inclusive of the parent-instructor conferences for his slow progress and multiple failures in the exams; Genin, Kabuto thinks, is a state also consisting of blue.

Blue is a learned defense.

It is his fifteenth birthday and he has officially failed the retake of the genjutsu tests. One of his teammates is going through his book collection out of boredom. Kabuto pulls the tins of paint from underneath his bed, unscrewing the caps in order and looking around for a glass of water to wet the brushes with.

"We're going in masks," he dictates aloud to the friends who were assigned to him, the picturesque dolls calculated to precise measurements.

"That's stupid, Kabuto."

Yoroi is the one who says that, Yoroi Akado whose kunai never hang straight no matter how many times he scowls down at the holster while he tries to rig them. He's in the middle of tying off another strip of cloth around the weapons when Kabuto makes the declaration; the immediate response is a glare.

"You wear masks later in the year, once summer gets in. We'd look out of place now," Yoroi adds in scornful rebellion, turning to the third member of the team with a snappish, "Don't you think so, Misumi?"

Misumi Tsurugu is more of a thinker, and he remains silent. He knows of Kabuto's tendency to perform elaborations. Kabuto has a willingness to risk getting caught by hinting at honesty, at giving his opponents a chance to puzzle out the challenge. Kabuto reveals too much unnecessarily in Misumi's opinion, but it is a function of his cleverness and Kabuto is acknowledged for it on his team.

In later years, this will become dangerous, this habit of careful setups which delay the actual mission. In later years, this sort of trickery will spare the life of a boy later on in a medical bed, but the present festival has no consequences of note to bid for, and should require no ruse. To request complexity is a function of blue; it is Kabuto's way of fulfilling the teenager that Konoha expects him to be, that his teammates expect.

Kabuto likes being that, the spoiled right-hand man who's an arc into arrogant and a degree into cocky. He considers that color to be a span of violet, the shade of it a perfect blend between red and blue. Orochimaru and Konoha, making purple when they overlap.

When Misumi makes no reply, Yoroi submits with an exasperated sigh of scorn. "Fine. Just because you always like getting your way, Kabuto, you can't lord it over the rest of us _all_ the time."

Unlatching the brushes from the kit, Kabuto simply passes them out. First to Yoroi, and then to Misumi. The latter accepts the brush as gravely as if he were handed a funeral marker, dipping it in the cup of water before he lets the tip hover over the dishes of paint.

"Stop hogging all the green." Yoroi again.

"Sorry," Kabuto apologizes, saying the word and feeling it not at all.

Kabuto's teammates have been in disguise for quite some time now. With the Kyuubi's attack as established history, there were so many orphans scattered in the Fire Country and so much destruction that it was easy to slip in extras. Students coming in from smaller villages. Trickling in later, over the early teenage years, just as Kabuto was reaching the stage of being assigned to a team.

Yoroi and Misumi don't have the talent for spying; for them, masks are one layer deep. They handle the white shells of the animal shapes gingerly in their hands, expecting that the choice is whim on Kabuto's part. So much else about the teenager's behavior is spun and counted off, with only occasional explanation.

This, they decide, is only another game. Cleverness without a point.

So they give in and paint.

Their tutor is a man bought off with promises from Orochimaru of petty power. A comfortable teaching position when the Sound overran Leaf. No further ambitions. Orochimaru is planning on having the man eliminated if the opportunity arises and Kabuto is aware of it, so he studies the weaknesses of his teacher even as he keeps half a mind on his lessons.

His teacher, believing that Kabuto is privileged enough to have a head full of Sound-spied missions, lets the boy off the hook in those rare times he catches Kabuto distracted in truth instead of simply in lie.

Recently Kabuto's preoccupation stems from a very particular order. Orochimaru suspects that their tutor might be selling out to a third party during this game of variable loyalties, so Kabuto's team has been ordered to do something about this. He watched his tutor as they walked through the village and were assigned to endless D-rank missions, and now, upon the eve of his assumed birthday, Kabuto has finally decided to act.

There are a million secrets that the instructor assumes are in the heads of his students. Kabuto Yakushi has only one. It is circular. Much bigger than his tutor's forms of deception, and Kabuto knows which of them will triumph when it comes to lies.

The color wheel is the only secret Kabuto's ever needed, and the sheer mass of it has been more than he'd like to handle. It moves on its own when he isn't looking, sliding and shifting as he walks around Konoha Village. At night it likes to stretch out like a cat fattened from too much cream, splaying its paws on the framework of his room as Kabuto lies in bed and thinks about what he carries within.

The secret is a rainbow bloated so large that it has doubled upon itself in order to cram the full of its bulk inside the boy's head. Sometimes the weight of it makes him wonder why he isn't staggering, the swollen pregnancy of his brain gone to burst in summer heat.

It's a good game for him as a teenager. The challenge of balancing everything keeps his mind alert and fresh. Perspective releases him from the pressure of spinning the wheel; when Kabuto needs to concentrate on a specific lie to wear, he thinks in colors.

Later after the festival has concluded and Kabuto has finished marking his assumed natal date, the teenager undoes his waist-sash and fishes out his gloves from where he'd hidden them. He frowns at the bloodstains upon the cloth. Those will have to be replaced. Yoroi had been predictably messy while surprising their victim, and all of Misumi's careful work to hold the subject down hadn't prevented a few superficial wounds from being applied.

The body will be found in a closet of his instructor's home. Slashing wounds across the belly and torso were opened with the help of a kunai, allowed to seep so that rotting crimson will creep out from underneath the door and so alert the man if he had not already gone for an extra set of linens. A simple message, from Orochimaru.

Kabuto is pleased with himself for determining the interloper's identity. When classes are back in session, the team will claim innocence of the death to their instructor. Everyone saw them at the festival in their masks. So distinctive had the patterns been, particularly out of season. Everyone watched them, took note.

At the time of the victim's death, people wearing those decorative face-covers were openly participating at a competition involving fruit and juggling. Kabuto had made sure of that. Their alibi is secure.

A wipe of his hand over the blue cloth soaked through with a stranger's blood, and the teenager decides that it was a satisfying celebration of his birth after all. The shirt goes in the laundry. His gloves, in the trash.


	3. yellow

****

.yellow

Kabuto brings the springtime mask with him when the Yakushis are called to the Uchiha home. It bounces on his hip as he walks, the laces dangling over his hand as he carries the heavy medical kits for the team. Jubilance over the accomplished mission involving his instructor has caused the teenager to bring the mask everywhere this year, as a form of a good-luck charm that Kabuto savors due to its wit.

His father slides the front door back.

The Uchiha rooms are covered in red.

Red is the color of old blood waking up, and for that reason, Kabuto always associates it with pain. That's when it's hardest to conceal, the way it floods his eyes, destroying them from innocent whites framed by a pair of convenient glasses. His veins boil. Sometimes, they threaten to overtake him.

Dangerous to be found in such a state. Every time Kabuto feels the rush of heat in his eye sockets, he looks away from everyone else, walks away, until the sensation dies. It is unacceptable for him to reveal himself like that to anyone in Konoha. He is a spy. His masks should be latched more firmly in place.

The death-speckled rooms of the Uchiha home yawn like the wet mouths of beasts in his heartbeat. Crimson and white are on every wall he looks at, stamped with the clan's fan-symbol boring into his eyes and begging them to bleed.

Kabuto, mentally, spins his inner wheel and watches it land on yellow.

He blanches. Covers his mouth in an old gesture reminiscent of when he was a child, fist to chin, knuckles to lips. His father, interpreting the motion to be a sign of nausea, ushers his son out of the room with hurried bird-hands.

"You need to be able to see these things, Kabuto," he warns the boy, even as he fusses over his son, urges him to lean against the wall until he catches his breath. "But... if you're not ready, your mother and I--"

"I can do it." Swallowing forces down a lump in his throat that Kabuto is not sure is real or not, so he pretends that it exists for the time being. Reaching up with his fingers to shove his glasses firmly into place, the teenager waits for his father's concern to ebb, and then follows the rest of his family inside for the corpse examinations to begin.

Yellow is a color Kabuto uses often with his parents. It is the shade of the medical unit outfits. Yellow is also considered a nervous color, that much he's read before, along with its symbolism for earth.

Yellow is the pigment of a weak stomach, one too shaky to want to witness the autopsies exacting.

It is the third color Kabuto saw after learning about white snow and red blood. His father's medical suit was the only patch of sunflower summer in the blizzard that had claimed Bellflower Pass. The Yakushi doctor wasn't fully geared up, his puffy jacket hanging over the jump-pants and reinforced mesh jacket; the medics were mixtures of combat readiness and hospital care.

Kabuto had gone to his knees at that point in time, equidistant between two bodies and debating if he was going to join them as a third. His feet were nerveless weights attached to stumps of legs. Frostbite was kicking in. A terrible job on his part, if he died before Konoha ever took him in. He would be written on the records as yet another nameless child, found frozen in the snow.

And yellow arms went around Kabuto in a rush of warm fleece, calling out that there was a survivor. _There was a survivor, someone get a blanket and bring him home._

White and yellow. Several years later when the Uchiha massacre is only a dimly crimson memory involving autopsy report sheets and paperwork, yellow remains. It is a comfortable color for their home. Kabuto's mother keeps the lights on in every corner, shuttered down with linen covers to diffuse the brilliance of the bulbs.

Kabuto at seventeen has grown into the nest of the cuckoo child. His mother has been unable to conceive another heir to replace him. Both parents are hoping that he will bring one of the older girls from his class home one day, show her to them while they nod their approvals and plot in advance for grandchildren.

That he has disappointed them in this task as well, they do not complain. Only inquire, tactfully, over the dinner table. Conversation for the family is a relaxed affair in their living room of muted yellow light, soothing infirmary colors.

"Are you going to take the test again this year, Kabuto?"

Pepper is passed, left to right.

"I should," Kabuto answers, and his nervousness is not feigned when his chopsticks clatter against the side of his rice bowl while he is receiving the spice shaker. He looks down at this with surprise. Why did his hand jerk like that? Why is he suddenly pensive? An appropriate yellow response, yes, but not one he consciously wanted.

"You'll do just fine, son. Don't tense up."

His father assumes Kabuto's bout of nerves comes from fear of the Chuunin exam, fear of failing the family once more. Six times through and no real results yet--Kabuto is always average on his paperwork, but his parents smile and defend him to other families as simply being a methodical type. Despite how he overlooks everything in homicide dissections.

Kabuto is not so at ease with the reaction he has just given that was not in his own control.

This year, Orochimaru will be watching for Sasuke Uchiha. This year, it might be the last time Kabuto has ever had to run the gamut of daily life. It's possible that his parents will be killed should the serpent-nin choose to attack Konoha; despite how his mother and father are medical staff, and so should never be directly in a fight, all things are likely on the battlefield.

It could be that this will be the final year that he will have to endure his family's pleasant smiles as they ask to pass him more fish, listen to them reassure that they still love him even if he doesn't come out at the top of his class.

This might be the end. No more.

Kabuto stares down at dinner, and realizes he has suddenly lost his appetite.

Later that night it's his turn for the bath. Kabuto steps inside the heated steam of the room, shucking his clothes off with mechanical ease. Down they go into the laundry hamper. It's half-full. His turn for doing the wash when it piles up, asking his mother where she'd stored the extra clothespins this time to get the lines up and clean.

Kabuto slides into the hot water of the tub gingerly, one hand on the wall and the other on the thick rim of the bath. He's the youngest in the house, so he goes last. His father and mother have already had their respective turns. Temperatures have wicked the heat off the surface of the water, so he reaches out and turns the knob, deciding to refill a few inches with hotter fluid.

The faucet disgorges a stream of clear liquid. Kabuto runs his fingers beneath the flow, watches it ripple and distort the image of his legs underwater.

Orochimaru has taken a keen interest in Sasuke Uchiha's class in case there is a threat to his claim on the boy's body. Kabuto has been asked to observe the members of the younger teams, those who might interact the most with the surviving Uchiha scion.

He has studied the ranks with some remote interest.

So far, all he has been able to determine is that there are a great number of youths with the determination to change fate itself. Naruto Uzumaki counts among them. The Nine-tails is beginning its ascent anew.

But there are others in the latest crop who bear notice. Kabuto knows one in particular out of the ranks after the girl's continual visits to the clinics, asking for help on herbs. Hinata Hyuuga, the weakest of a prominent clan. Her routine checkups cause his father to cluck his tongue, commenting separately to Kabuto that the girl's physicals betray the emotional pressure she is under. The cousin Neji as well; none of the Hyuugas have very stable resistances, pushed constantly under their family's milk-white eyes.

Orochimaru has dismissed most of Kabuto's reports on any potential of Sasuke's classmates thus far. The snake expects that none of them will be of any value. In the event of the Sound's attack, Orochimaru has made it clear that he expects Kabuto to simply eliminate any students the spy happens to encounter. Kill the younger generation. Then there will be no one left to come after Sasuke.

Orochimaru has a fondness for prodigies, after all; the snake does enjoy collecting them.

With the fixation that Orochimaru has for the Uchiha youngest, Kabuto does not know if it is possible to avert Sasuke from being swallowed whole. Not unless he wants to kill the boy, and if he resorted to those kinds of measures to keep someone out of Orochimaru's hands, Kabuto might as well gut half of Sound under the pretense of freeing them. Then himself, in the tub.

Kabuto's gaze tracks across the ceiling as he leans back to soak, the off-ivory tone that's distorted from the bathroom lights. Yellow.


	4. red

****

.red

It rains after the Chuunin finals, which makes for washed-out tracks.

Kabuto watches it pour.

The Anbu will be delayed in hunting him due to the weather conditions. Even if there are patrols sent out, they will not be able to detect where he is hidden. Kabuto detached himself from the rest of his unit and bid them go on ahead. Those are his decoys.

Despite how close Kabuto sits to the village, near enough that he can see one of the local footpaths from his perch, the spy is confident that he will not be found.

Branches interlace into a canopy above him. Konoha's forests are thick. The shield of leaves is not complete; a steady trickle of rain is coming down right on his shoulder, so Kabuto is holding up the stolen Anbu cloak and appreciating the fact that it is weatherproofed. Huddled beneath it, the heat of his breath warms the air around his face and hands.

Dry powder lingers on his skin from the chemicals he used to erase his scent. Kabuto takes a careful sniff of his wrist, and smells only dust. Blank. He is nothingness once again, this time sitting in the rain.

He wonders even now if there are Anbu going through his room, ransacking it for clues.

He wonders if they will interrogate his parents.

He wonders--except he does not have to wonder, because he _knows_ his parents will be called in to do the autopsies of the Anbu guards he killed. Kabuto can imagine his father kneeling by the corpse done up to look like the adopted son he had taken in so many years ago. Kakashi Hatake would be in attendance, describing how the bodies were animated. The fight. Kabuto knows how his father will examine the stitching of the false-face grafted onto the mobile corpse, and he wonders if the man will voice aloud the way he must feel betrayed.

They will cut off the skinwork of Kabuto's face from the body and discard it to the side to be studied later. That is his mother's job; Kabuto knows how the woman's eyesight is better than her spouse's, and how his mother will spread out the flesh-mask beneath her magnifying lenses. She will dutifully file the report with the same careful script she has always used, and then make a copy for the criminal records. She will help put her son into the wanted list with her own hands.

At dinner tonight, Kabuto's parents will sit alone in their living room if they are lucky. More likely, they will be kept at the clinic until dawn, shuttling in victims in need of emergency care. The infirmaries might overspill. Kabuto's parents will be there because it will be easier than going home, than turning on the yellow lights in the hallways and listening to the silence.

They did not expect this deception from the cuckoo they adopted so long ago. His instructor might have, but the man had escaped when the other Sound agents had fled Konoha. His teammates were a part of the ruse, and both deceased now, unable to be questioned.

A million secrets in the form of a single ruse have always been in Kabuto's mind, compressed into the bands of a solitary circle. His time before his father's prism is one of them, a fractional color gone hidden in the strands. The death of his instructor's conspirator is a second. They remain in their appropriate zones, dyed in greens, blues, violets of the acts.

As he looks up at the sky during the thunderstorm, Kabuto sees the rain in shades of scarlet. It comes down in waves, filling his ears the same way the rainbow-beat floods the water-roar to dull bass pulses of a heart murmur. He sees red because he _is_ red, old blood moving crisp in his veins after proximity to so much fighting.

That's another.

There are more secrets, concealing themselves in the muscular folds of the color wheel, each one a part of the spectrum.

Now he's not sure if he's lost the rights to some of his hues, or simply traded them away.

He cannot go back to Konoha. Orochimaru failed. Kabuto figured he would. Lacking Kimimaro and Sasuke both for hosts, Orochimaru simply hadn't measured up. The Hokage had come out a marginal victor from the standoff while Kabuto had spent his own time dressed in stolen cloak and mask, skirting between the Sound in borrowed clothing and the true Konoha Anbu.

During that time, he had found himself among the Konoha ranks and suppressed his laughter as they barked out orders between the packs to hunt down any traitors. Loyalty? Kabuto had learned that the word was only an application of a form; wear what shape you are expected, and others will believe you enthusiastic for their cause.

Orochimaru had presented him with an open challenge. Kabuto had recognized the trick. The loss of one Uchiha heir would not slow Orochimaru for long. Killing Sasuke would only condemn Kabuto as unwilling to assist the snake.

And so instead, Kabuto's familiar blue cleverness had been presented. Deliberations over Sasuke's hospital bed, careful construction of the Anbu dead to ensure him a way out that he would have never needed if he had not stopped to sew his face to them. Kabuto's arrogance in play once more. Kabuto's habit of leaving clues, reported numerous times over to the snake by his instructor and his former teammates.

Kabuto, no longer able to be used in the infiltration of Konoha Village because he willingly gave up knowledge to Kakashi that he was a spy.

A blue tendency. He is infamous for it. And Orochimaru accepted his excuse with a smirk that said he excepted such a flaw in his favorite toy.

The rain collects in a puddle on Kabuto's arm and trails down the folds of the cloak. It leaves a path as silvery as a slug's remains. Kabuto can feel the miniscule weight of it running across the cloth. He knows if he looks at the water-smear, he will see crimson stained upon his shoulder, crimson painted all upon him as he huddles underneath the trees to keep out of the red, red rain.

Konoha hadn't been required for destruction. Orochimaru's blind need for vengeance couldn't be turned so long as the Third Hokage remained alive; the snake-nin had only wanted to join with the Akatsuki because they would have provided him with a venue for his petty pride, and no amount of reasoning could convince him otherwise.

To Orochimaru, the growing problem of Naruto and the Nine-tails was a remote situation. A diagram on the pages of a medical manual, dry dictation in a study's afternoon when nothing written down compared to the reality of the sunlight shifting on the wall.

Kabuto tries to remember the color of yellow, to remember his father's study and his parent's home, but it's raining red all around him and he can't seem to focus on the shade without it melting into sun. The orange he is, created from the yellow of his adopted family and the red of old blood.

Orange contrasts blue, he's heard, which throws him now into direct opposition to the genin he used to be. Blue jacket and blue laughter and blue-lined homework papers.

Red. Yellow. Blue. Primary colors. Everything else is mixed from those three, he learned; they are the purest pigments, unable to be created in reverse except by creative visual illusion. Light is a different story, following a tune of red-green-blue, but Kabuto is limited to paint. If he tries to combine all the colors on his own, the result will only be black.

Now the rainbow turns.

The secret is heavy and thick inside him as Kabuto Yakushi begins to pick the patterns of his day from the shadow colors overlapping.

Orochimaru will expect him back soon, to bandage him up after the failed attack and speak soothing words. Kabuto is a skilled asset, having been reared by the chief medical unit of Konoha; his business, whether he has an opinion on it or not, will involve attendance upon the Sannin. He is unaware of the full nature of Orochimaru's wounds, but that is a matter that can be determined once he arrives.

Kabuto looks out into the mist of the thunderstorm and thinks of violet. Red and blue, melding together to make the face he will wear for the snake. Cleverness. And blood.

Primary colors yoked to primary meanings. Everything, Kabuto decides, is built from these. When all the colors shine together, white might be restored, but the chances are far more likely that his results will be black.

He doesn't know how many colors are left to him right now, but the game has not yet concluded. There are other circumstances that he will use various masks for. The Akatsuki. Kimimaro. Naruto. More.

On a wheel as vast as a rainbow, as twisted as an illusion's strip, Kabuto knows that he can find a niche for everything.

Someday it will come time to tally all the hues up. Then he will finally see if he can return to white, or if he is made of paint.


End file.
